Frankenstein vs. the World

“the problem with the metal now
is that people will go to bat for stuff
that’s really quite fine
and is utterly unmemorable
and could not grow a barnacle
if it sat in wet dock

for a thousand years
and another thousand
and then several more thousand
unrotting
stable
post-everything
no barnacles”
– John Darnielle

Tags: john darnielle.

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Tags: angel.

Tags: christmas.

Tags: ish klein.

. . . Damian Weber, Sarah Cambpell, Usher, & a winter’s morning in Queens . . .

Tags: damian weber, sarah campbell.

Proving once more to be the best show in town, Just Buffalo’s BIG NIGHT brought Ish Klein in last night to read her poems and screen three videos. Ish is one of my favorite living poets, and her work never ceases to surprise me or to twist my mind in weird & untidy knots. I took some video at the reading which I might have up soon. For now, here is the first short she screened, Personal Add. “This is a video version of a poem. The text is frayed and the voice is covered in static. Those are the challenges of the subject’s situation. ”

Tags: ish klein.

Julian Koster’s the Music Tapes brought their magical winter pageant to Buffalo last night and I left feeling enchanted & slightly sick on vegan sweets. I highly recommend dropping everything for 30 mins - 3 hrs to see the “Lullaby Tour” if you live or will be anywhere near the 200+ houses it’s passing through. Note the singing sheep.

Tags: julian koster, music tapes.

. . . the song that’s stuck in my head this week . . .

Tags: dream bitches.

One outcome to anticipate from Assange’s point of view . . . would be a technological arms race in which state agencies shift from security clearances and encryption to more sophisticated digital defenses. But another possible development appears in an NSA text called “Toward a Taxonomy of Secrets” published by [rival leaker John] Young on his own leak site, Cryptome. The author, a philosophically minded engineer for the NSA, concludes that not all secrets can or need to be digitally managed:

Our efforts might, in some cases, be better applied to understanding the motivations and dynamics that are creating the secrets in the first place, with an eye toward coming up with a system that better maps to the human processes and behavioral tendencies.

We may find that by shifting the structures, rules, and value systems in human space, we have fewer secrets to deal with. We may find that we can alter the human-space systems to clarify the context and valuation of secrets, and put them into a form more amenable to elegant automation. We must get back to the notion that, in dealing with secrets, the human/automation construct works better if the whole system is adapted to the behaviors, values, and motivations of the humans.

A more secure world, for the engineer, is one in which on the one hand, secrets are safest when those who want them kept mobilize human beings’ various positive desires for secrecy, while on the other by “shifting . . . value systems” one may create less need to have certain information secret, and hence to have it revealed, as the case may be. Roberto Bolaño describes such a state of affairs in By Night in Chile (2000). The narrator is sworn to “absolute discretion” about being hired to give General Pinochet’s junta an academic introduction to Marxism. Having completed this black-comic commission, he unburdens himself to a friend, only to hear his story repeated all over Santiago, to his horror. He expects recriminations, but the phone never rings. “At first I thought this silence was the result of a concerted decision to ostracize me. Then, to my astonishment, I realized that nobody gave a damn. The country was populated by hieratic figures, heading implacably towards an unfamiliar, grey horizon, where one could barely glimpse a few rays of light, flashes of lightning and clouds of smoke” (By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews, 102). This world already exists, its logic expressed by the Daily Telegraph’s deputy editor, Benedict Brogan: “The Saudis would like someone to whack Iran? No kidding . . . . infinite boredom” (”WikiLeaks is embarrassing – but not serious,” November 28, 2010). WikiLeaks, did not create new possibilities for Brogan’s boredom: by his own declaration, he was already well and truly bored. Maybe, then, it’s actually the vastness of such uncaring that WikiLeaks brings to light, in so doing giving it the chance to be otherwise.

Tags: rei terada.